by David Long
Perhaps any uncomfortable sense of awe or unease could be minimised by reflecting on the fact that however lordly the practitioners of these arts appear, one is dealing with ‘trade’ – and pretty low trade at that. The splendid house of Huntsman, for example, was originally a gaiter and breeches maker. The august Mr Poole, ‘founder of Savile Row’, was in reality a humble draper who stumbled accidentally into tailoring after stitching his own military tunic. And even the great Henry Maxwell, the street’s most famous bootmaker, started out fashioning spurs in a primitive forge in his own back yard.
But actually such snobbish assertions as these don’t help at all. All these men were true craftsmen, and their descendants still are. They are the real deal, still the best in the world, and so in their own way every inch as aristocratic as any of their most distinguished customers.
Besides which, consider this: you don’t make it in this business without exceptional skill and you don’t survive for two centuries in any business – let alone one as mercurial and mendacious as this one – by being staid, stuffy, a stick-in-the-mud or anything less than really very, very good at what you do.
This, of course, is why a Savile Row suit can cost as much as a small car. And also why the people who produce them still strive, as they always have, to produce clothes that combine comfort with elegance, and quality with good taste, and that make a nod toward the fashion of the day while fully honouring what made sense in the past. In Savile Row, you don’t just buy a suit, you don’t just buy a piece of history. You buy something that will look better next year than this, better still the year after that, and that twenty years from now will be somewhat worn (in a good way) but still perfectly robust and absolutely serviceable.
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1 See list of Livery Companies in Chapter 13.
2 Both stores originally included a grammatically precise apostrophe in their names, but Harrod’s abandoned this in 1921 and Selfridge’s in 1940.
3 Interestingly, as the Diamond Jubilee Year drew to its conclusion, it was announced that London’s Goring Hotel was to receive a Royal Warrant ‘for Hospitality Services’, and the connection was clearly the Prince’s. The hotel was, of course, where Catherine Middleton spent the night before her wedding, but the grantor was HM The Queen.
10
Green London
‘How sweet the morning air is!
See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo?
Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank.’
Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Shuffling toe-to-heel down Oxford Street, stuck solid in the rush-hour or choking on bus fumes at Farringdon, it’s hard to believe that overcrowded London, its population now at a 100-year peak, is still one of the greenest and most open cities anywhere in the world. It’s not just because of what Pitt the Elder called London’s ‘great lungs’ – the more than 6,000 acres of Epping Forest on the one side (owned by the City of London Corporation), and on the other that great arc of historic parks and gardens at Bushy and Hampton Court, Syon, Osterley, Richmond and Kew. Nor, indeed, the well-known ‘cultivated wildness’ of Hampstead Heath or Hyde Park, the former another possession of the City’s and the latter a somewhat surprising survivor, including as it does 350 acres of some of the most valuable land anywhere on earth.
In fact, what makes London so green are the many lesser-known parks and gardens, many hundreds of them, from the deceptively lush shrubberies in the likes of Bedford, Russell and St James’s squares, through the tree-lined walks of Battersea Park and the Thames embankments to those hidden enclaves that make up the lawyers’ ancient Inns of Court and – by far the best of all – the more than forty high-walled acres complete with a vast lake, flamingoes, rare shrubs and who knows what other delights Her Majesty gets to enjoy.
Admittedly, an invitation to the regular summer garden parties affords a few of us a brief glimpse of what lies behind the Palace walls, but there are, even so, many other open spaces that offer easier access for anyone in search of what in London at least passes for peace and tranquillity. Of these, some are astonishingly large, but others so small you wonder how they came to be and how they have survived. In their own ways, all offer visitors the chance to make a brief escape from the streets, to get away from the hurly-burly and the sheer breathless pace of contemporary city life.
Peaceful Postman’s Park, for example, so called because of its proximity once to the old GPO building behind St Paul’s, could not provide a greater contrast to the hard-faced, high-rise office blocks that are its neighbours. Popular with city workers who come to kick off their shoes at lunchtime, to snatch a quick cigarette or sneak a bit of sunshine, it is also where the celebrated Victorian painter G. F. Watts proposed siting a national memorial to the heroism of ordinary people.
Here, on a long wall beneath a wooden awning, ceramic plaques celebrate the selfless heroism of fifty-three ordinary men, women and, especially, children. The otherwise unsung heroes include: Alice Ayres, a labourer’s daughter ‘who by intrepid conduct saved three children from a burning house at the cost of her own young life’; Thomas Simpson, who ‘died of exhaustion after saving many lives from the breaking ice at Highgate Ponds’; and brave little Harry Sisley of Kilburn, who was just ten years old in 1878 when he drowned attempting to rescue his baby brother.
ZSL – NOAH’S PARK
As described elsewhere in this chapter, James I introduced pet crocodiles, camels and even an elephant to St James’s Park, but historically most royal animals were kept in the royal menagerie at the Tower of London and continued to be so for more than 600 years. In medieval times, these included three leopards, a lion and – from 1252 – Britain’s first ever polar bear, a gift to Henry III from King Haakon IV of Norway. Three years later, the bear was joined by an African elephant, which arrived by boat as a gift from France’s Louis IX, and later still by another lion, a tiger, a lynx, a wolf, a porcupine and an eagle.
In the sixteenth century, it was felt necessary to erect a special viewing platform for privileged visitors ‘to stande on to see the Lyons lett out’ – and by the time they began to admit the public it was becoming clear that the Tower of London was no longer the ideal place to house a collection of such large and rare beasts.
Around London at the time, there had long been a number of private collections, such as the one run by a family of circus owners on the Strand. From 1733, they started displaying cages of lions, tigers, monkeys and other exotic species, among the most celebrated of which was an elephant called Chunee. He once stole Lord Byron’s hat, and appeared in panto at Drury Lane, but was eventually driven mad by his years in captivity. So much so, indeed, that the beast unfortunately killed his keeper and then went on the rampage. As bystanders fled, musket-wielding soldiers were called in to silence the animal, two of them discharging a remarkable 152 rounds before the coup de grace was delivered with a dagger. Sadly, even then the elephant’s torments weren’t over, with Londoners queuing to pay a shilling to see his carcass being butchered and his skeleton going on display in Piccadilly. Eventually removed to the Royal College of Surgeons, the bullet holes still clearly visible, Chunee’s bones were finally destroyed in an air raid in 1941.
All too often, the animals in the royal menagerie fared little better. A pair of ostriches, for example, had died after being fed more than eighty nails by keepers labouring under the misapprehension – common at the time – that the flightless giants could digest iron. (The elephant belonging to James I had similarly been fed a daily ration of red wine, in the belief that during the summer months at least elephants were unable to drink water.) Then there was the ape that was beaten to death after hurling a 9 lb cannonball at an onlooker.
In 1831, it was finally decided that enough was enough, and a decision was taken by William IV to donate the animals to the Zoological Society of London. Recently established by Royal Char
ter in Regent’s Park, the first of its kind anywhere in the world, it would provide the animals with practical enclosures, appropriate food and staff who knew what they were doing. The ‘zoo’ as it became known – the first time the word was coined – would also give scientists an opportunity to observe the animals at close quarters, and the public a chance to engage with species hitherto only glimpsed in storybooks.
Inevitably, some inhabitants had broader appeal than others and, over the years, several of the zoo’s residents have achieved near-celebrity status.
1850 – Obaysch the Hippopotamus
The arrival of Europe’s first hippo since Roman times caused such excitement in London that visitor numbers to the zoo actually doubled. Almost as popular was the Quagga, which famously became the only live example of this subspecies of South African zebra to be photographed because, by 1870, the remainder had been hunted to extinction. (More recently the Quagga also became the first extinct species to have its DNA studied.)
1865 – Jumbo the Elephant
Travelling with P. T. Barnum’s famous circus, history’s most famous elephant tragically died after being hit by a train in Canada in 1885. Before joining the circus, however, he lived in Regent’s Park, his immense size giving a new word to the English language. Loud protests greeted the decision to sell the beast to Barnum for $10,000 (about £150,000 in today’s terms) – 10,000 children wrote to Queen Victoria to try to reverse the decision – but the sale went ahead.
1914 – Winnie the Bear
At the start of the Great War, a junior army officer posted to Europe with troops from Canada presented the zoo with a North American black bear. Lt Harry Colebourn had named the bear after his home town of Winnipeg and, like many children, Christopher Robin Milne named his teddy bear after the animal following a visit to Regent’s Park with his writer-father, Alan Alexander Milne. The rest, as they say, is history.
1947 – Guy the Gorilla
When another European war threatened, the animals were removed to the relative safety of Whipsnade in Bedfordshire. (Only one died as result of enemy action – a young giraffe, which succumbed to shock after a bomb exploded nearby.) When the zoo reopened, a new arrival (on Guy Fawkes Day 1947) was a baby gorilla, immediately winning the hearts of the public when he was photographed clutching a hot-water bottle against the November chill. Guy was the original gentle giant – he frequently caught sparrows in his giant paws before letting them fly off – sadly dying at the age of 32 during a dental operation.
1949 – Brumas the Polar Bear
The first polar bear bred in Britain, Brumas – named after keepers Bruce and Sam – was so popular that, in 1950, visitor numbers peaked at three million, a figure that has still not been surpassed. Brumas was actually female, but an early press article reported otherwise and, in the public’s mind, the mistake was never put right.
1950 – Eros the Snowy Owl
Seeking shelter from a storm on board the Royal Navy’s HMS Eros, this splendid bird lived at the zoo for more than forty years during which time he fathered nearly sixty chicks. (Other particularly long-lived residents have included Belinda the Mexican red-kneed spider and another polar bear, Pipaluk, both of whom survived into their early twenties.)
1965 – Goldie the Golden Eagle
Zoo animals occasionally make a break for it and, in the mid-1960s, central London literally ground to a halt when thousands of motorists stopped in the park so they could watch Goldie swooping from tree to tree. Successfully evading capture – and gaining a mention during Prime Minister’s Questions – Goldie was eventually returned to his enclosure after spending a couple of hours short of twelve days on the wing.
At Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a dozen acres of lawns and plane trees overlooked by the collegiate buildings of the lawyers are surprisingly quiet, too (given the proximity of noisy High Holborn). So quiet, indeed, that it is hard to believe that this is where, in the late sixteenth century, many thousands of Protestant revellers gathered to witness the grisly execution of fourteen Catholic traitors. Sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for a plot to oust Good Queen Bess in favour of her cousin Mary, the leader, Sir Anthony Babington, was reportedly still fully conscious when his evisceration began.
Equally hard to credit is that (as previously noted, in the 1930s) the authorities ordered these lovely gardens to be dug up, excavating many hundreds of yards of deep trenches and armoured bunkers. In the event, they were never used, and who knows what purpose, if any, they serve now?
No less strange is Coram’s Fields in nearby Bloomsbury, if only because its pleasures are strictly off-limits to adults unless they are accompanied by a child. Occupying the site of a wealthy seafarer’s Foundling Hospital, a niche in a pillar by the roadside once housed a revolving ‘All-Comers Basket’ into which unmarried mothers could deposit their unwanted infants.
On the first day, more than one hundred were left in this manner, and with more than four times that number arriving in the days that followed, hospital staff were quickly swamped. It was obvious that this well-meaning but random and chaotic admissions policy had to be abandoned, and eventually the hospital went too, although fortunately a new one was created around the corner in Great Ormond Street. The site was developed but, happily, nine acres of gardens were saved by the newspaper proprietor Viscount Rothermere, thereby giving children kind enough to treat their parents to a day out somewhere green and pleasant to go and play.
Fortunately, adults are free to wander through the Royal Parks unaccompanied, but it wasn’t always so. For years, many hundreds of acres of wilderness were set aside for hunting deer with the public rarely being granted access, and when they were, they were given strict instructions to behave. Queen Anne, for example, largely restricted access to ‘foreign ministers, nobility, Parliament and the Queen’s household’. King James I similarly had a large menagerie in St James’s Park (see panel above), but very much for his own pleasure rather than the public’s. Later, there were aviaries here, too, along the side of what is now Birdcage Walk. And George II’s wife made a concerted effort to claim both St James’s Park and Hyde Park for herself, despite the public having, by this time, enjoyed reasonably good access to both since the 1670s.
Happily, Queen Caroline failed in her bid – although nearly 300 acres of Hyde Park were pinched to create Kensington Gardens – but there are still plenty of reminders of the days when the parks were the sovereign’s personal domain. There are, for example, some pretty odd regulations, such as it being illegal for anyone in a bath chair to travel three abreast through Hyde Park. And while it is true that no one any longer needs a key to enter any of the Royal Parks, we are nevertheless still forbidden to brandish a sword in such a place or touch a pelican without written permission. (Pelicans are a bit of a tradition here, incidentally: in 1664, the Russian ambassador presented a pair of birds to Charles II and, nearly 350 years later, they are still a popular gift from foreign ambassadors newly appointed to the Court of St James’s.)
In Hyde Park, one can at least now ride a horse along Rotten Row, but once upon a time this, too, was a royal prerogative. The name indeed is a corruption of the French ‘route de roi’ or ‘king’s road’, dating from the end of the seventeenth century when William III, an asthmatic, moved the court out of town to Kensington Palace. Finding the walk to St James’s too dangerous, he installed some 300 oil lamps along his new road, making it the first artificially lit highway in the country.
St James’s Park is far smaller than Hyde Park but nevertheless perhaps the best of them, with its famous waterfowl – every native species of duck, apparently, and then some – which are lucky enough to have their own private Duck Island to escape to when the crowds of visitors become too much.
The ornamental Swiss cottage on the island is a nice example of nineteenth-century kitsch and was built by the Ornithological Society of London. With typical Victorian ingenuity, its designer included an elaborate steam-heating mechanism for the efficient incubat
ion of eggs. And while the modern concrete footbridge may be no match for the 1857 original – an elegant suspension design – looking west from it the view across the lake still offers walkers one of the best prospects the whole of London has to offer.
In particular, the exotic silhouettes of Horse Guards and Whitehall Court, with their spikey towers and domes, contrasts wonderfully with the big wheel of the London Eye and provides a perfect counterpoint to the magical reflections of the park’s gnarled old trees.
When it comes to old trees, however, Regent’s Park claims the prize thanks to a clutch of fossilised stumps situated by its own lake in the Inner Circle. The last surviving remnant of the defunct Victorian-era Royal Botanic Society, these are perfectly genuine and quite an extraordinary thing to stumble upon in the middle of a twenty-first-century city.
And speaking of stumbling, next time you’re in St James’s Square take a closer look at the statue of King William III in the centre. See that small hump under the horse’s left rear leg? That represents the molehill upon which His Majesty’s mount stumbled in 1702, throwing the king to a prolonged and ignoble death. The anniversary of this unhappy event was marked for many years by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s men, who – traitors to a man – used to drink a grateful toast to ‘the little gentleman in black velvet’.
Of course, other parks have their peculiarities too: the gardeners in Soho Square, for example, keep their tools in a rustic, octagonal, Tudor-style summerhouse, while those in Grosvenor Gardens store theirs in a pair of tiny, folly pavilions decorated with literally thousands of seashells. The pair was a gift from a grateful French nation after the Second World War and, in return, we put up a large equestrian statue of their Marshal Ferdinand Foch.
Perhaps the most curious building, however, is the large Art Nouveau rotunda in King Edward Memorial Park in Shadwell on the north bank of the Thames. No mere folly, despite its fancy brickwork and elaborate appearance, this not-so-mini-colosseum is actually an over-decorated flue designed to vent noxious fumes from Rotherhithe Tunnel. These days, cars and trucks are to blame but somewhat less than 100 years ago the culprits would have had legs rather than wheels. The tunnel originally provided a route for horse-drawn wagons to reach the docks, something that explains the narrowness of the carriageways and the severity of the bends, which continue to cause problems for larger vehicles attempting to cross from north to south.